In New York City, a Toll Is Newly Felt as Asians Rise in the Police Ranks

Officer Peter Liang is the rookie who fatally shot an unarmed man, in what police officials said was an accident, in the stairwell of an East New York, Brooklyn, housing project.

Lt. Philip Chan is the veteran officer who suffered a broken nose after being punched during a protest on the Brooklyn Bridge.

And Officer Wenjian Liu was one of the two policemen who were gunned down in their patrol car in Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brooklyn.

Within the last few weeks, Asian-American officers have been in the middle of a series of wrenching incidents involving the New York Police Department. Their front-line roles are more than just coincidence: They testify to a little-noticed but significant surge in their ranks.

Twenty-five years ago, there were just 200 Asian-American officers in New York City. Now there are more than 2,100 in uniform, or six percent of the total, police statistics show. The percentage of academy graduates, moreover, has jumped to 9 percent, from 4 percent, in the last decade.

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Yishan Tu, 23, of Queens, passed the written test for the New York Police Department last year. Ms. Tu, a native of Taiwan, thought her Mandarin and Taiwanese skills would be in demand.CreditChang W. Lee/The New York Times

Many arrived in the United States as children and grew up on the Lower East Side of Manhattan working alongside their parents in restaurants or garment factories. And a good number say they chose law enforcement because of the allure of a steady Civil Service job, a less-heralded career path than the legal, medical and engineering tracks that many immigrant families — especially those coming from wealthier and better-educated backgrounds — aspire to.

“Even though the elites get all the attention, this is the group that’s comparable to most other immigrants and migrants that have entered into the American workplace,” said John Kuo Wei Tchen, a New York University historian who is a co-founder of the Museum of Chinese in America. “This is the working man’s opportunity to move up the ladder.”

Asian-Americans are now assigned to all precincts, not just ethnic enclaves such as Chinatown; Flushing, Queens; and Sunset Park, Brooklyn. But with critical mass has come, invariably, more risk.

Officer Liu is believed to be the first Chinese-American to be killed in the line of duty in the city. Last year, Officer James Li survived after being shot in the legs on a bus in Brooklyn.

About half of the department’s Asian members are Chinese, reflecting the composition of the city’s overall Asian population. But even with their growth, Asians are still underrepresented in the department relative to the 15 percent of city residents who identify themselves as Asians, census figures show. By comparison, 10 percent of the Los Angeles Police Department’s officers and 13 percent of that city’s population are Asian.

But barriers abounded a generation ago. The department’s 5-foot-8 height requirement for men — overturned by litigation in the 1970s — disqualified an untold number of candidates, especially those who hailed from Hong Kong and southern China, where the men are typically shorter. And few immigrants had law enforcement or military roots; if anything, many, accustomed to repressive governments in China and Taiwan, were suspicious of authority.

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A member of the Brooklyn Asian Civilian Observation Patrol at a rally last month.CreditMike Segar/Reuters

One veteran officer in Chinatown, who moved to New York from Guangdong province when he was 10, said that while his parents were open-minded about his career choice, many of their friends disapproved. He remembered his parents’ friends alluding to a common axiom, which roughly translates as “Good sons don’t become public officials.”

“Few would become cops,” said the officer, who spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to speak publicly. “But now more and more.”

Other skeptics included the New Yorkers the officers were trying to protect.

“Some people refused to be arrested by me, even when I showed them the badge,” said Thomas N. Ong, who retired in 1999 as a detective and is now a private investigator. “They’d say things like, ‘You’re a cop? There are Chinese cops? I didn’t know Chinese were cops.’ ”

The police had all but adopted a laissez-faire attitude toward Asian-dominated neighborhoods, “thinking that the Asians had their own way of doing things,” said Peter Kwong, a Hunter College professor who has written several books about Chinatown.

“There’s a long history of frustration,” he said. “When you complained they would say we don’t know the community, we don’t know the language. And since Asians didn’t vote, there was no pressure on the police to be proactive.”

Even today, with the increased Asian presence on the force, language remains a barrier. Chinese officers, particularly older ones, tend to speak Cantonese or Mandarin, and not the Fuzhou dialect that has become more prevalent in working-class areas like Chinatown and Sunset Park. Tensions also persist over neighborhood issues like enforcement of street-vending rules and police vehicles taking up precious parking spaces in Chinatown, which abuts Police Headquarters and court buildings.

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Recruits at graduation in June.CreditMichael Appleton for The New York Times

But the department has moved to integrate its ranks far more quickly than, say, the Fire Department, after aggressive recruiting and community-relations efforts. Protests in Chinatown alleging police brutality in the 1970s, as well as intensifying gang violence in the 1980s, accelerated that endeavor, Professor Kwong said.

Another breakthrough came in 1984, when Hugh H. Mo was appointed as deputy police commissioner of trials, and became the highest-ranking person of Asian descent in city government. He gladly posed for a recruiting poster.

Years after Mr. Mo, a former prosecutor, left office, he said, “I ran into these parents who came up to me and said, ‘Mr. Mo, my son is a cop, and they say it’s because of you.’ ”

The recruitment effort extended beyond the five boroughs. Robert May, a retired Port Authority of New York and New Jersey police officer who is president emeritus of the New Jersey Asian American Law Enforcement Officers Association, said that New York police officers would attend his group’s events, and try to convince members to take the city’s written test. Several did.

Detective Ong was one of about a dozen officers who founded the Asian Jade Society, a police fraternal group, in 1980. By 1994, when the group held its annual banquet, there were 300 members. A few years ago, the group exceeded 1,000 dues-paying members.

“We envisioned that it was going to grow, but to grow to 1,000 in my lifetime?” Detective Ong said.

The story of Officer Ben Hoo Wong, who works out of the 109th Precinct in Flushing, is typical.

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An unidentified woman holding a Chinese-language newspaper with coverage about the murders of Officers Wenjian Liu and Rafael Ramos.CreditBryan R. Smith for The New York Times

Mr. Wong, 42, emigrated from Taishan in 1991 with his parents and two older siblings. After working in a garment factory and spending a year at LaGuardia Community College, he became a Postal Service employee — another popular Civil Service option — because his parents wanted him to land a “good, stable government job,” he said. But he also volunteered to be an auxiliary officer, because “since I was a young child, my parents said I needed to help people.”

After some budget cuts at the post office, Mr. Wong said, he applied to the Police Department and graduated from the academy in 2010 as the oldest new officer, at 38, in his class. Since then, he has routinely handled situations requiring a Chinese-speaking officer. He says he is inspired by how many Asian-Americans have become department supervisors.

If Mr. Wong embodies the current generation, then Yishan Tu, a 23-year-old native of Pingtung, in southern Taiwan, may well represent the future.

When Ms. Tu’s family moved to Queens eight years ago, her father, a schoolteacher, could find work only as an assistant to a real estate agent. But, she said, the family scraped by thanks to government and community help, and she attended public schools.

The call to public service may have been stoked by friends, also immigrants, who joined the military. So with her family’s blessing, she eyed a similar avenue — the police — because she thought her Mandarin and Taiwanese skills would be in demand. She passed the written test last year, and is now waiting for her chance while working as a double-decker-bus tour guide in Manhattan.

“I want to give back,” she said. “I’m going to be one of the good guys.”

Jeffrey E. Singer contributed reporting.

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